Re: [g-a-devel] Happy patch bonanza

[Hynek Hanke <hanke brailcom org>]

Bill Haneman writes v St 28. 06. 2006 v 18:57 +0100:
> > recode.patch
> >   Patch for gnome-speech festival driver.  When one of the Italian
> >   voices is requested, switches the g_io output channel to latin1
> >   instead of utf-8.
> Are you sure this is sufficient?  Don't you need to call g_convert in
> order to convert the strings from the gnome-speech client to latin1
> before passing them to the engine?

>That's great news.  But it seems to me that there should be something
>more general and robust than just checking the voice string, in order
>to determine the correct encoding which the festival engine/voice
> expects.
> [...]
> Note also that this problem seems to have been introduced on May 14 when
> Will explicitly changed the encoding on the iochannel from ISO-8859-1 to
> UTF-8.  Will, can you explain why you did that?

Hello,

if you use festival-freebsoft-utils to communicate with Festival, then
you can send all the input in UTF-8 through the appropriate functions
and let Festival care about the necessary conversions between encodings.
Encodings can be easily defined by the user in the configuration file,
or can be specified by the author of the voice, as is the case with
festival-czech. It has a dependency on the 'recode' utility.

festival-freebsoft-utils also provide other nice functions (such as
partial SSML support) and a coherent API. I'm CCing its developer
Milan Zamazal who can answer future questions better than me.

If you want to go some other way, I'd highly recommend that the encoding
used for different voices is easily configurable by the user. I think
there is no way how to determine the encoding of a given voice in
Festival automatically (which is of course broken :( ), so giving the
user the power to fix the problem without recompiling anything is very
important.

With regards,
Hynek Hanke